Editor's note: Read more of the highlights from the ASU + GSV Summit on our blog.

What will the future of work be like for people who want a middle-class lifestyle but no college degree? Several experts debated that in a panel titled, “What Will Middle-Skill Jobs Look Like in 2025?” at the ASU + GSV Summit in San Diego on Wednesday. A few of the more than 4,000 attendees at the ASU + GSV Summit 2018 meet in one of the lobbies at the host hotel in San Diego. The summit attracts people from the enterprise, investment, higher education and PreK–12 communities. Photo by Charlie Leight/ASU NowDownload Full Image

James Homer, senior vice president, Pearson AcceleratED Pathways: “Companies look at middle-skills jobs as a key imperative around capturing growth. They can be customer facing, back-office or service jobs. They require soft skills and the ability to interact with fellow employees and customers; they have to have technical skills to execute business functions. They are in many cases on the front lines to growth. As hotel chains have huge capital budgets to build more hotels, there’s an army of people they need to staff them. It cuts across every industry segment.

“There are huge segments of the work force who will be disintermediated through automation. For customers we talk to, there’s an imperative to streamline their business workflow, but they have to retrain their workforce to support that. Employers are not saying that all employees will be kept. But for a lot of employers, the number one job is identifying the skills needed and getting their employees there.”

Kristin Sharp, executive director, Shift: The Commission on Work, Workers, and Technology at New America/ Bloomberg: “The middle-skills jobs are ways to earn income that are nontraditional that get people to a middle-class lifestyle. It isn’t just working with your hands or having a certain level of education, it’s having a pathway or vision into a lifestyle that will support a family and give workers a sense of purpose. Because advanced technology platforms are changing the entry points into the workforce, nobody knows what that will look like. We need to redefine that.

“Often, the defining characteristic of what kinds of jobs will be available in the future is that they’re self-directed or motivated. The worker needs to take responsibility for finding the type of work they want to do, finding the skills that will get them there, connecting with those skills and proving that to an employer. That’s a very hard thing to figure out how to do. Workers like specific programs with employers.”

Jonathan Kestenbaum, managing director, Talent Tech Labs: “When you think of middle-skills labor, it’s people who have a hard time articulating their skill set to an organization. In some cases they don’t have a resume. It’s hard when an organization has a tracking system that only focuses on a resume. We’re starting to see some new tracking systems that don’t focus on a resume.

“There are skills-based assessments out there. There are game-based behavioral assessments that will show risk averse you are, etc. There are simulation-based assessments in which you actually go through a simulation of, for example, a call center to see if you’re a good fit. Candidates can test themselves to see what kind of job they fit into.”

Derek Apanovitch, president, Ultimate Medical Academy: “We’re a national online allied health institution focusing on administrative-type programs. Middle-skill jobs pay at least $15 an hour or more. The lower end of that could be medical coding, and the upper end could be surgical technicians, but below nursing. The bottom rung is home health aides. We’re often serving students who are at the bottom who want to move up to the middle. They want to improve their earning potential.”

Mary Beth Faller

Next Story

Stress is a natural state for college students, and talking it out with friends is a great way to cope. Over the past year, Arizona State University has been helping students learn how to become better listeners to their friends who need emotional support.Devils 4 Devils is a unique kind of peer counseling that empowers students to confidently pay attention and react to students who are stressed o...

Training teaches ASU students how to be caring, supportive friends

Stress is a natural state for college students, and talking it out with friends is a great way to cope. Over the past year, Arizona State University has been helping students learn how to become better listeners to their friends who need emotional support.

Devils 4 Devils is a unique kind of peer counseling that empowers students to confidently pay attention and react to students who are stressed or facing mental health issues. The peers learn practical skills like active listening and how to ask open-ended questions.

“The idea is that emotional well-being is all of our responsibilities. It’s not only the responsibility of the Counseling Center or the health centers,” said Aaron Krasnow, associate vice president of ASU Counseling Services and Health Services.

“People turn to each other all the time to get support. But we also recognize that sometimes we might feel unprepared to talk to friends about their emotional difficulties,” he said.

“How do you help the helpers?”

So Devils 4 Devils, which was launched about a year ago, offers four levels of training:

Video: A four-minute video on the ASU website explains the importance of emotional well-being in a college community and offers brief information about signs of distress and ways to help.

Video of Emotional support for ASU D4D 1 0

Video courtesy ASU Counseling

General helping skills: This two-hour training is open to any ASU student who is interested. Primary goals are to learn about mental health and signs of distress and to hone skills as a helper.

Leadership training: This two-and-a-half-hour session is open to student leaders in residence halls, student government, clubs, Greek life, athletics or other areas with a focus on mental health and signs of distress in individuals and in groups and ways to build and sustain emotionally healthy communities and teams.

Care Squad: A six-hour training for students who want an active role in mentoring and serving individuals and groups of students. After training, Care Squad members will provide direct service in the form of outreach training and events, drop-in support groups and workshops.

Over the past year, 612 students were trained in general helping skills, 56 student-leaders took leadership training and 73 students trained to become part of the Care Squad.

The sessions offer specific skills in how to ask someone how they’re doing in a way that creates the openness for response and how to communicate in an empathetic way.

“We also offer students ideas about what to do when you hear something that’s concerning or sad or scary. Because we all have those things in our life. And if I share my sadness with you, now you have to hold my sadness a little bit,” Krasnow said.

“And so it’s both how to ask and how to receive information. Because if you only teach someone how to ask, they’re underprepared for what to do with it.”

Krasnow said that sometimes students worry that a peer will share something that shows they’re really at risk.

“My answer is that they’re already talking to each other about their pain. But if they’re not, and someone shares that, thank goodness. Because that person can get help.

“What we don’t want is students to feel alone in their pain. What we don’t want is someone to be at risk and to think that there’s no one they can talk to.”

Preston Johnson, a graduate student at ASU, took the Care Squad training and found that students were happy to learn specific ways of responding.

“What are some ways to navigate those conversations without being charged with, ‘How do I fix this for them?’ ” he said.

“It was an in-depth look at how to be supportive rather than remediative.”

For example, when someone describes stress over an exam, don’t point out that that he or she should attend tutoring.

Advice comes from good intentions. “But the subtext can be, ‘I don’t want to experience that stress with you. I want you to be out of it,’" he said.

“An empathetic response takes vulnerability and effort. A simple response is, ‘Wow, it sounds like this class means a lot and you’re worried.’ It’s communicating, ‘It’s OK for you to feel this way in front of me.’ ”

Johnson said that Devils 4 Devils is about creating an environment where people feel supported in sharing their feelings.

“It builds on this philosophy that people in general can handle the things that come up in their own lives. What’s difficult is when you feel like, ‘I’m in this by myself.’"

Other universities offer peer counseling, but ASU is unique because the trained students are not part of Counseling Services and Devils 4 Devils is a university-wide wellness initiative, Krasnow said.

“There will never be enough professional counselors in the world for everybody who will be in pain, and nor should we think that all emotional pain should be dealt with by professional counselors,” he said. “We invest in professional counselors, and psychologists and social workers, we invest in peer-to-peer impact, we invest in online strategies and self-help, all to try and reach as many people as possible.”